Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, with a New Preface

The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris and Modern Gastronomic Culture, with a New Preface

Spang, Rebecca L.
Gopnik, Adam

Paperback

Series: Harvard Historical Studies, Book 135

Business GeneralFood WritingFrench History

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0674241770
ISBN13: 9780674241770
Publisher: Harvard Univ Pr
Published: Jan 14 2020
Pages: 352
Weight: 0.60
Height: 0.90 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.20
Language: English

Winner of the Louis Gottschalk Prize
Winner of the Thomas J. Wilson Memorial Prize

Witty and full of fascinating details.
--Los Angeles Times

Why are there restaurants? Why would anybody consider eating alongside perfect strangers in a loud and crowded room to be an enjoyable pastime? To find the answer, Rebecca Spang takes us back to France in the eighteenth century, when a restaurant was not a place to eat but a quasi-medicinal bouillon not unlike the bone broths of today.

This is a book about the French revolution in taste--about how Parisians invented the modern culture of food, changing the social life of the world in the process. We see how over the course of the Revolution, restaurants that had begun as purveyors of health food became symbols of aristocratic greed. In the early nineteenth century, the new genre of gastronomic literature worked within the strictures of the Napoleonic state to transform restaurants yet again, this time conferring star status upon oysters and champagne.

An ambitious, thought-changing book...Rich in weird data, unsung heroes, and bizarre true stories.

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